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Crisis of the Late Middle Ages
The '''Crisis of the Late Middle Ages' lasted from about 1337 AD until 1453 AD. It began on the eve of the Hundred Years’ War between the two leading European powers of the day, France and England. It then ended around the year 1453. Various dates could be chosen for the end of the Middle Ages; the arrival of the printing press in 1455, often cited as one of the greatest invention in the history of mankind; the death of Henry the Navigator in 1460, the first great patron of the Age of Discovery; or most commonly 1500, a nice round number. But it is hard not to chose 1453, both the year Constantinople fell to the Ottomans and the year the Hundred Years' War ended. The 14th and 15th centuries brought the long period prosperity and growth of the High Middle Ages to a halt. In the late 13th century, Europe and the globe entered a particularly cooler era known as the Little Ice Age, that resulted in periodic poor harvests and famines, notably between 1415-17. In 1347, it was further stuck by the most devastating pandemics in human history, the Black Death. Perhaps a third of Europe's population died, and would not recover to pre-plague levels for 200 years. Along with depopulation came social upheaval and unrest, the largest of which was the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 in England. Meanwhile, the unity of the Catholic Church was temporarily shattered by the Great Papal Schism of 1378, where for three decades two (or occasionally three) Pope reigned in Christendom. To add to the many problems of the period, the Hundred Years’ War saw the two most powerful realms in Europe fight out 116-years of endemic warfare; England and France. At issue was continental lands held by the English kings since the Norman conquest of England, and a French succession crisis that left the English king with a credible claim to the French crown. There were three phases separated by truces. The English got the better of the first phase, and the French the second. Then France descended into a long bitter period of civic war during which the English made almost unimaginable gains, occupying much of northern France. Ultimately, it proved unsustainable in the face of passionate French patriotism embodied by Joan of Arc. In the end, for all the great sacrifice almost no territory changed hands in the French victory, but the war had a profound effect on both nations. Historians have long considered the Hundred Years’ War a milestone in the emergence of a patriotic sense of national identity in both countries. The art of war too was revolutionized; the centuries of the feudal knight were clearly on the wane, and the age of the longbowman was already giving way to those of artillery. It also established the embryonic European Balance of Power, ''the dominant theme of European history for the next 500 years; a permanent economic and intellectual rivalry, an ceaseless arms race, and soon competitive colonialism. On 29 May 1453, Constantinople finally fell the Muslim Ottoman Turkish Empire, who were now a power in Eastern European as well as the Middle East. More than the Byzantine Empire and two-millenia of Roman civilisation came to an end that day. The world was changing, and the Middle Ages themselves had passed away. A new spirit of adventure infused Europe, already evident in the Renaissance, an efflorescence of culture whose influence would be felt in everything from painting, architecture, sculpture, philosophy, literature, music, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Just 35 years after the fall of Constantinople, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope opening up a sea route to the Orient. Four years after that, a little known Italian called Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. The Age of Discovery had begun. History Background to the Conflict The term '''Hundred Years War' (1337-1453) was defined centuries after the events, and is in many ways misleading. In fact, English and French were only sporadically at war, since sustained warfare was impossible to keep up; it was too expensive. Tension between the two crowns can be traced back centuries earlier, to the origins of the English royal family itself in the Norman conquest of England in 1066. And the conflict would continue long afterwards, at least until the loss of the last English foothold of Calais in 1558, or even until 1904 when the two nations finally signed an agreement that was to last; the Entente Cordial. Ever since in 1066, the descendants of William the Conqueror had been able to lay claim to lands on both sides of the English Channel. In their continental territories, the English kings still owed homage as vassals of the French crown, and the fact that they were kings in their own right in England didn't change that. For a time, under Henry II of England (d. 1189) and his immediate successors, the greater part of the France owed allegiance, not to the royal family crowned in Reims, but to the one crowned in Westminster. Yet the French crown gradually consolidated its authority over the whole geographical area of France, particularly during the reign of Philip II of France (d. 1223) who acted decisively to exploit the weaknesses of King John, both legally and militarily. By the reign of Louis IX of France (d. 1270), only the Duchy of Aquitaine in the south-west remained in English hands. In practical terms, Aquitaine had a great deal of independence, but a noble there might appeal against their lord to the royal court in Paris. Any medieval power struggle was not just one of warfare and political intrigue, but a complex game of dynastic marriages. The princes of great families married within the same limited circle, thus western European rulers became an interconnected web of cousins; sometimes with good claims to each others throne. One such marriage in 1308, between the daughter of Philip IV of France (d. 1314) and the son of Edward Longshanks of England (d. 1307) was meant to seal a lasting peace. Instead, it would also produce an eventual English claimant to the French throne itself, and the longest and bitterest conflict between the two most powerful kingdoms in Europe; France had a huge population of perhaps 18 million people, while England had about 3.5 million. Until the early 14th-century the Capetian Dynasty (987-1328) had been remarkably fortunate; since the reign of Hugh Capet (d. 996) there had always been a son to inherit the French crown for twelves generations. But their luck had finally run out. Between 1316 and '26, all three sons of Philip IV ascended to the French throne in turns, each leaving no male heir. With the direct line of the House of Capet rendered extinct, for the first time in over three centuries, there was a succession crisis in France. By proximity of blood, the nearest male relative was Edward III of England (1327-77), whose mother Isabella was the sister of the previous three French kings. The French nobility balked at the prospect; an English king still in his minority, under the regency of Isabella and Roger Mortimer who were widely suspected of having murdered the previous English king. An assembly of French nobles and bishops instead awarded the crown to the nearest heir through male ancestry, another nephew, Philip VI Valois (1328-1350 AD); the Valois Dynasty (1328-1589) would go on to rule France for two-and-a-half centuries. The English king seemed at first to accept the decision, distracted by his own internal struggle, but tensions between the French and English monarchies steadily grew. Edward III of England expected to be given a free hand in Scotland, but during the Second War of Scottish Independence (1332-57) the French king formally renewed the Auld Alliance, and offered the boy-king David II Bruce (d. 1371) refuge. By 1336, the two kings were enemies, although not yet openly at war. The final breach came when Edward offered refuge in England to a disgraced French noble called Robert of Artois, who had committed forgery to try to obtain an inheritance. When Edward refused to surrender him to French justice, Philip declared that Edward had forfeited the Duchy of Aquitaine for breaching his obligations as vassal. Rather than seeking a peaceful resolution, Edward responded by reviving his claim to the French crown as the grandson of Philip; effectively a clear declaration of war. Hundred Years' War (1337–1360) The opening hostilities of the Hundred Years' War were at sea, for control of the English Channel. At the time, neither England nor France had anything like a professional navy, instead relying on commandeered merchant vessels converted into warships. Both sides attempted to hire war-galleys from the Italian city-states, but were more successful disrupting the others efforts. After some preliminary attacks on the others commercial shipping and coast, the decisive confrontation came at the naval Battle of Sluys (June 1340) off Flanders. Medieval naval warfare war pretty simplistic; an exchange of arrows from the fore and aft castles as the ships closed in, then grapples were used to bring ships close, followed by boarding and a desperate bloody fight at close-quarters on the wooden decks. The larger French fleet took up a defensive formation, with their ships bound together, and this would be their downfall. While the English fleet spent some time manoeuvring to gain the advantage of wind and tide, the French ships drifted east with the current and became entangled with each other. The French were attempting to move back west and ill-prepared, when the English attack came. The English clearly got the better of the opening exchange, in an early example of the power of the longbow. The longbow derives its power from shooting heavier arrows, more accurately, at a faster rate. English archers had honed their skills in wars with Scotland, first demonstrating their devastating effectiveness at the Battle of Falkirk (1298). As the battle progressed the French tactic of chaining the ships together continued to proved disastrous, allowing the English to attack ships with overwhelming numbers, while other enemy ships sat immobilised. At this little know battle, the French navy was almost completely destroyed or captured. England would dominated the Channel for the rest of the Hundred Years' War, with the result that the fighting took place on French soil, rather than English. The English were unable to followup on Sluys for six years, with Edward III plagued by money problems, with fierce opposition to taxation to fund overseas adventures. At this point, the war might have lost all momentum were it not for a succession crisis in Brittany in which Edward III and Philip VI backed different claimants; the War of the Breton Succession (1341-65). The war thus became a series of back-and-forth struggles on multiple fronts in Aquitaine, Brittany, and a revolt in ever-independent Flanders. In 1346, the English decided to open a new front, crossing the Channel with a force of 10,000 men, and invading Normandy. Edward embarked upon a Chevauchée, ''a fast moving plundering and pillaging campaign across the fertile countryside of Normandy, razing every town in their path including Caen. Philip was caught completely by surprise, but eventually mustered a far larger French army and set-out in pursuit. Edward marched north-east making for Flanders, but despite some daring river crossings, found himself unable to outmanoeuvre Philip with no choice but to give battle. At the '''Battle of Crécy' (August 1346), the English took-up a prepared defensive position on a hillside ideal for their archers. Again and again the French heavy cavalry thundered up the slope in the face of a barrage of English arrows, which caused heavy losses. By the time the charges reached the English men-at-arms, they had lost much of their impetus and were repulsed in fierce hand-to-hand combat. Crécy was a landmark moment in European military history, with the growing professionalism of the English army proving decisive; superior leadership, organisation, and cohesion between the knightly elites and common-born infantrymen and bowmen. This contrasted sharply with the indiscipline of the French, whose infantry were an ill-armed and ill-trained rabble, as likely to be ridden down by their own side as hot-blooded knights saw any delay in charging as an affront to their honour. English discipline and tactical skill would bring many more victories in the future, while the French seemed to learn little, despite losses totalling perhaps 10,000 including 1,200 knights and noblemen. These losses crippled the French army's ability to the English siege of the port-city of Calais, which capitulated after 11-month in August 1347; it would remained in English hands even after the Hundred Year' War until 1558. In desperation, Philip appealed to the Scottish king David II Bruce for help, but he was heavily defeated and captured at the Battle of Neville's Cross (October 1346). Edward returned home in triumph, and celebrated with a series of festivals and jousting-tournaments. He also inaugurated the Order of the Garter, to bolster the spirit of camaraderie between himself and his greatest nobles. Central to Edward's policy throughout the war were the pomp and ceremony, the use of anti-French propaganda to strengthen a sense of national unity, and appeals the chivalric honour of his nobles. In 1347, the Black Death arrived in Italy on ships from the east, decimating the population of Europe, and bringing all significant campaigning to a halt. When Philip VI died in 1350, he left France divided by war and plague; things would get no better under his son John II Valois (1350-64). After the plague had passed and England was able to recover financially, Edward III organised two large armies for a second major campaign, one in the north under his own command, and the other in Aquitaine under his son, Edward the Black Prince (d. 1376). Chevauchées in 1355 devastated many towns and villages especially in the south, seriously effecting French tax revenue, and sticking at the French king's reputation, who seemed incapable of defending his subjects. The same tactic was attempted the next year, this time intending for the two English armies to join up. But a series of delays and a failed attempt to cross the River Loire at Tours, left the Black Prince in a precarious situation. He began retreating south, but was outflanked by a larger French army near the town of Poitiers. Prince Edward seemed willing to negotiate terms, but John insisted on total surrender. At the Battle of Poitiers (September 1356), the English took-up a defensive position on a brief slope behind hawthorn hedges, between a river on one side and dense forest on the other, offering the French only one route of attack unsuitable for cavalry. The French strategy was sound; a coordinated attack all across the English lines predominantly with infantry, using their numerical superiority to overwhelm the enemy. But again, French indiscipline led to catastrophe. When the English removed their baggage train from the field, for unclear reasons, the French cavalry on the right flank assumed it was the start of a retreat and charged prematurely; the cavalry on the left flank eventually followed suit. Both cavalries were thus routed, before the infantry got anywhere near the English lines. The tide was turned when the English cavalry launched a wide flanking manoeuvre and crashed into the French rear. Fearful of encirclement, the cohesion of the French army disintegrated with many soldiers attempting to flee the field. The French king stubbornly fought-on, winning renown for his personal courage, but was eventually surrounded and forced to surrender. The defeat at Poitiers sent France into crisis. The realm was left in the hands of the Dauphin, the future Charles V (1364-80), who faced rebellions across the kingdom. King John II was meanwhile taken to England as a prisoner. In 1359, Edward III launched a third major campaign intent on taking the cathedral city of Reims, where kings of France had for centuries received their coronations. Unable to capture Reims nor Paris, he moved on to the town of Chartres. At Chartres, disaster struck when a freak hail storm struck, and devastated Edward's army, killing about 1,000 soldiers and 6,000 horses. This prompted him to opened negotiations with the Dauphin, eventually agreeing the Treaty of Brétigny (1360). The first phase of the war ended on very favourable terms for the English. Edward renounced his claim to the French throne, but gained full sovereign rights over an expanded Aquitaine and Calais, as well as a huge ransom for King John II. France meanwhile lay devastated, territorially dismembered once again, and economically crippled for a generation by John's ransom. But there would be many more twists and turns in the Hundred Years' War. Black Death (1346–1353) In the 14th century, a tremendous period of population, urbanisation, and economic growth in Europe came to a dramatic halt. As the planet entered the cooler climate of the so-called Little Ice Age, agricultural crises became more common, notably the Great Famine of 1315-17. Widespread crop failures started with unusually heavy rain in spring 1315, and lasted through 1316 until the summer harvest in 1317; Europe did not fully recover until 1322. Yet the demographic consequences of this famine were nothing compared to the plague that struck Europe later in the century; the Black Death (1346-53). In the 1330s an unusually virulent strain of plague inflicted Central Asia and China. It seems to have had elements both of bubonic plague carried by fleas, particularly those which live on black rats, and of the pneumonic variety, in which the plague spreads on the breath of infected victims. The lethal infection may have killed 25 million Chinese and other Asians of the Mongol Empire before making its way westwards to the Genoese trading colony of Kaffa in the Crimea in 1347; at the time, the Silk Road was easier to travel than ever before, with the Mongols policing the whole route in an enforced Pax Mongolica. ''From there, Genoese merchants brought it home to Europe, most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats that were regular passengers on merchant ships. Sicily was the first part of Europe to be infected in October 1347. The trading ports around the Mediterranean of the Italian Maritime Republics saw the symptoms in January 1348. The disease spread northwest across Europe, striking France, Spain, Portugal and England by June 1348, striking Germany, Scotland and Scandinavia from 1348 to 1350, and finally striking Russia in 1351. The results everywhere were devastating. The contemporary Florentine historian Matteo Villani (d. 1363) wrote, "''it was a plague that touched people of every condition, age and sex. They began to spit blood and then they died; some immediately some in two or three days, and some in a longer time. Most had swellings in the groin, and many had them in the left and right armpits and in other places; one could almost always find an unusual swelling somewhere on the victim's body." As much as a third of Europe's population died; the same is true for the Islamic world. The cities and towns were hardest hit. At least 60% of the population of Florence, Hamburg and Bremen perished. Half the population of Paris and London died. The plague repeatedly returned to haunt Europe and the Mediterranean throughout the 14th to 17th centuries, though never as virulently as this first outbreak. Europe's last major outbreak occurred in Marseille in 1720. It took 200 years for the world population to recover to its pre-plague level. The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, killing over 75 million people by 1350. The plague's profound religious, social, and cultural impact has been compared to that of the similar epidemics, such as the Justinian Plague that was prevalent in the Byzantine Empire from the 6th-century, the Antonine Plague of the Roman Empire from the 2nd-century, the combination of diseases that killed perhaps 90% of the native population of the Americas after the arrival of Christopher Columbus, or the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the 1980s. With Europe's population succumbing in vast numbers and healers at a loss to explain the cause, religious fanaticism and paranoia swept the continent in the wake of the plague. The wells, it was said, had been deliberately poisoned by the Jews. The first massacre of a Jews occured in Toulon in France in April 1348. In town after town Jewish communities were annihilated, with notable massacres in Erfurt, Basel, Strasbourg, Mainz and Cologne. Fleeing this new horror, Europe's Jews made their way east, mainly to Poland where King Casimir III (d. 1370) enthusiastically gave them refuge and protection; he is said to have been influenced by his Jewish mistress. Various other groups were singled out, such as as beggars, Romani gypsies, people with skin diseases as mild as acne, and women accused of witchcraft. The Black Death hit the Christian Church particularly hard, since the clergy contracted the disease while caring for the sick and dying. There were severe shortage of priest in the aftermath. The losses were eventually replaced by hastily trained and inexperienced clergymen, who often lacked the rigour of their predecessors. Along with events such as the Great Papal Schism of 1378. this played a part in the general decline in clerical discipline evident in the 15th-century, that would eventually result in the Protestant Reformation. Of the more positive effects, despite the dramatic fall in population, the European economy did not collapse; the productivity and commercial activity of the 13th was largely maintained. Those peasants who survived the plague found their situation to be much improved. Land was relatively plentiful, wages high, and the more odious obligations of serfdom all but disappeared. Urban workers found opportunities in professions that had previously been closed to them by guilds. It was possible to move to new localities in response to wage offers, and rise higher in life. Royal authorities in Western Europe instituted restrictions on both wage increases and the relocation of workers; such laws were the cause of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 in England. Although the Black Death highlighted the shortcomings of medical science in the Middle Ages, it also led to positive changes in the field of medicine. Another incidental effect was a dramatic increase in building with brick and slate roofs, rather than traditional wood and thatch where rats liked to live. Hundred Years' War (1369–89) The terms of the Treaty of Brétigny were never acted upon. King John II died while still a prisoner in London in 1364, and the French refused to pay the rest of the ransom. His son Charles V Valois (1364-1380 AD) inherited a kingdom in a state of disaffection and lawlessness; a peasant revolt in the north known as the Jacquerie; hostility from the nobility led by Charles of Navarre; the opposition of the Paris bourgeoisie; and the Tard-Venus, soldiers lately employed in the war that turned to banditry and pillaging. Yet his reign marked an astonishing recovery of French fortunes. The new king was highly intelligent, but suffered from serious ill health, possibly the side-effects of an attempted poisoning in 1359. He nevertheless devoted intense energy to ruling; as one historian wrote, "Not surprisingly, the king lived under a sense of urgency." Charles' skillful management of the kingdom allowed him to overcome his domestic challenges, restored stability to the realm, and replenished the royal treasury. He surrounded himself with a talented group of advisers, notably a minor noble from Brittany named Bertrand du Guesclin; a veteran of that provinces bitter civil war and an expert in guerrilla warfare. Central to his statecraft was restoring the prestige of the royal family, by emphasising the divine nature of kingship. It began with his own coronation at Reims, where with great pomp and ceremony he was anointed with same sacred oil as St. Louis and Charlemagne; oil that had supposedly been brought from heaven by the Holy Spirit for the baptism of King Clovis in 496 AD. This elaborate ceremony later proved crucial for his grandson Charles VII in uniting France at the darkest moment in the Hundred Years' War. Charles V's reign was dominated by hostilities with England, but he eschewed direct confrontations at least in his early reign. Instead there were series of proxy-wars. Charles managed to negotiate the marriage of his second son to Margaret of Flanders, the most eligible heiresses in France, thus foiling an English plan to expand their influence on the continent. In Brittany, the English backed claimant had prevailed in the civil war, but the local nobles pressured him to pay homage to Charles of France rather than Edward of England; the Bretons sought to maintain their independence, whenever the French or English became too assertive in their lands. Another region where England and France sought to gain influence was Castile in Spain, supporting rival claimants in a succession crisis; Peter the Cruel and his younger half-brother Henry. Du Guesclin led the French forces, and was able to drive Peter out of Castile in 1365. Then an English victory at the Battle of Nájera (April 1367) restored Peter. But it proved a pyrrhic victory; the Black Prince was forced to withdraw, suffering from the protracted illness that would eventually kill him, and the English army suffered badly from du Guesclin's guerilla tactics in the retreat. In 1369, Peter overthrew once again by du Guescli, and this time was murdered. For the English, the campaign had achieved nothing at great cost. Deep in debt, the Black Prince resolved to recover his losses by heavily taxing his subjects in Aquitaine, and some local nobles appealed to the King of France as their feudal overlord. By the Treaty of Brétigny, Charles V had lost his authority over Aquitaine, but summoned the Black Prince to Paris to answer the complaints of his vassals in 1369, on some dubious legal pretext. When Edward refused, the second phase of the Hundred Years' War began. This time conditions favoured the French; Edward III was too old to campaign, and the Black Prince too sick. Where his grandfather and father had plunged into battle, Charles V opted for a strategy of attrition, with numerous small-scale offensives on multiple fronts. The Black Prince had withdrawn to England, and the defence of Aquitaine was led by his younger brother John of Gaunt (d. 1399). John was married to the daughter of Peter the Cruel, the recently deposed king of Aquitaine, which brought Castile firmly into an alliance with France. The Franco-Spanish navy virtually destroyed the English fleet at the Battle of La Rochelle (1372 AD), opening yet another front in the war, with destructive raids against the coasts of Aquitaine. Meanwhile, the English position continued to weaken; Edward the Black Prince dying in June 1376, and Edward III himself 12-months later, bringing a ten-year-old child, Richard II Plantagenet (1377-99), to the English throne. By the time peace was agreed in the Truce of Leulinghem (1389 AD), the English continental lands had been reduced to small territories around the ports of Bordeaux, Brest, and Calais. With both sides war-weary and raked by internal strife, the peace would hold for several decades. Build-up to the Final Phase (1377-1415) By the time Edward III of England died in 1377, the townsmen and peasants of the England were sick of the war, and the high taxes needed to sustain it. The reign of his young grandson Richard II Plantagenet (1377-99) was fraught with economic, social, and political crises. The unruly mood of the kingdom was first expressed in the Peasants Revolt (1381). In the wake of the Black Death, England began to adjust to the changed economic situation where manpower was in short supply: wages were driven sharply upwards, eroding the profits of landowners. The royal government, under young Richard II and his uncle John of Gaunt (d. 1399), responded with a range of drastic measures to control the economy, that attempted to fix wages at pre-plague levels, to impose fines on those who refused to work for low wages, and to make it a crime to break a contract and move elsewhere for higher wages. But the system was unenforceable, applied in a rather arbitrary fashion, and deeply unpopular. Moreover, never before had the royal authorities allied itself with the local landowners in quite such a blatant way. To this indignity was added a new form of taxation, a poll tax of one shilling levied on every person over the age of 14. Designed to spread the cost of the war over a broader economic base, widespread evasion proved to be a serious problem, and increasingly draconian methods of collection. Civil disorder including attacks on tax collectors flared-up in many parts of the country during the spring of 1381. The revolt started in Essex and Kent, where rebels from both regions rapidly grew in numbers under the leadership of at Wat Tyler (d. 1381); "Tyler" suggests his occupation was a roof tiler. As the uprisings spread, the Kentish rebels advanced on London, which because of the war in France was relatively undefended. While king Richard, who was still only fourteen years old, sheltered within the Tower of London with his councilors, several building were looted and burned including the Savoy Palace. Without the forces to disperse the rebels, Richard tried to negotiated with the rebels, but that same day, a small group of them assaulted the Tower of London, and murders two members of the Privy Council held responsible for the poll tax. The young king agreed to a number of concessions including the repeal of the poll tax and a general amnesty, which dispersed many of the rebels, and showed considerable courage in personally meeting with Wat Tyler at Smithfield on 15 June. Exactly what happened at the meeting is unclear, but some sort of altercation broke with a servant of the king, and Tyler was pulled from his horse and killed. The situation was now precarious, but the king acted with calm resolve, persuading the remain rebels to disperse with continued to promises of clemency. The rebels should never have trusted him of course. Uprisings in other parts of the country were easily put down, and once the danger had past, Richard revoked the pardon that he had granted, personally hunting-down and hanging every rebel he could find; some 1,500 in all. Years later when Richard needed of popular support, he found he had none. No more was heard of the king's other concessions either, but then no more was heard of a poll tax in English either until 1989. It is difficult not to conclude that Richard II's triumph over the Peasants’ Revolt gave him lofty ideas of his own power. A firm believer in royal prerogative, the young king cultivated a refined atmosphere at court, in which the king was an elevated figure, with art and culture at its centre; ; Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1343), the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages, served in various official roles. Yet his high-handed behaviour led to a series of political crises. On coming of age in 1383, Richard wrestled control away from the Privy Council which had overseen his minority, by replacing them with a group of favourites, mostly young upstarts like Robert de Vere (d. 1392). But Richard's choice of companions were not the kind of men the great barons approved of. And above all, he abandoned the war with France. Richard found himself opposed by a group known to history as the Lords Appellant; appealing to have his favourites removed. The first crisis of his reign came in 1386 when the king needed to raise new taxes to balance the royal financed. When parliament refused, Richard declared this treasonable and retreated to the Midlands to rally his supporters. He dispatched his friend Robert de Vere to London with an armed force, but was defeated at the Battle of Radcot Bridge (December 1387). A few days later Richard returned to his capital humiliated, where parliament purged the Privy Council of his minister, and established a new council led by his uncle John of Gaunt, which effectively took over the government. By 1389, Richard had gradually re-established royal authority and governed in relative harmony with his former opponents for the next eight years. But if the Lords Appellant thought they had Richard under control, they were dead wrong. In 1397, the king took his revenge, ordering the arrest of the five senior members for treason; two were executed, and three exiled for ten years, including Henry Bolingbroke (d. 1413), the son of his uncle John of Gaunt and heir to the Duchy of Lancaster. Bolingbroke departed peacefully to Paris, but the following year Richard went further. On the death of John of Gaunt, he confiscated Bolingbroke's vast Lancastrian inheritance, and declared his banishment for life. Finally feeling secure, the king left the country to campaign in Ireland. But Richard had gone too far: the right to property and inheritance was the very basis of law and order in England. With nothing to lose, Henry Bolingbroke returned from exile, landing in Yorkshire in June 1399. Then he began a triumphant march across England, rallying both noble and popular support. By the time Richard made it back from Ireland, his support had melted away, and he surrendered to Henry at Conwy in Wales without even giving battle. The following day at a special sitting of parliament, Richard was deposed, and Bolingbroke formally claimed his cousins throne as Henry IV; Richard died in prison four months later probably from neglect and starvation. Henry IV Lancaster (1399-1413) ascended to the English throne with broad acclaim. He was a warrior of great renown who had been on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and had a reputation for affability and statesmanship. Nevertheless, he was undeniably a usurper, a grandson of Henry III but far from next in the line of succession; this questions of legitimacy would eventually erupt into the War of the Roses. Much of Henry's own reign was plagued by troubles, and with each plot or rebellion his regime became more repressive. The unrest prompt the last great uprising of Welsh nationalism, led by Owain Glyn Dwr (d. 1415). The Welsh lords had generally supported Richard II against Henry, and after his abdication they found their opportunities severely limited. Meanwhile, Richard had had no son, so there had been a long period with no Prince of Wales. So in 1400 the Welsh proclaimed their own. Despite an early defeat, under Glyn Dwr's leadership the uprising grew in strength. A breakthrough came with the capture in 1402 of Edmund Mortimer, an English lord with estates on the Welsh borders as well as family in Northumberland. Glyn Dwr persuaded Mortimer to join the Welsh cause, while his cousin Henry Percy of Northumberland went into open rebellion against Henry IV. By 1404, Glyn Dwr had captured the important English strongholds of Aberystwyth and Harlech, and began to truly rule as Prince of Wales. Yet it proved the high water mark for the rebels. The tide turned again by another man proclaimed Prince of Wales, the son of Henry IV; the future Henry V. Through the campaigns of the younger Henry, by 1408 Glyn Dwr had lost Aberystwyth and Harlech, and two years later was reduced to the status of an outlaw. He's believed to have died somewhere in hiding in about 1415. While the dream of independence had crumbled, the Welsh would get the last laugh; a reverse takeover of the English throne by Welsh nobleman Henry VII Tudor. Nevertheless, by the time Henry V Lancaster (1413-22) succeeded his father to the English throne, the country was calm and ready to exploit France's own turmoil. In the background to the Hundred Years War, the antagonism between England and France embroiled and intertwined itself in wider European geopolitics. Most notably it sharpened an ongoing struggle within the Catholic Church the eventually erupted into the Great Papal Schism (1378-1417 AD). Since 1309, the Pope had been based not in Rome but in the French enclave of Avignon, but such a setting was not natural: the prestige the Pope derived from the Holy See of St Peter in Rome; and their secular territorial base was the Papal States in Italy. So in 1377, Pope Gregory XI (1370-78) returned the papal curia to Rome. After almost seventy years on French soil, the papal court was French in its methods and to a large extent in its staff, and back in Rome some degree of tension between French and Italian factions was inevitable. Gregory died within a year of the return, and the contentious election of the new pope took place in the midst of rioting in Rome. Pope Urban VI (1778-89) from Naples was an attempt to find a compromise between the two factions, but he quickly proved a divisive figure, prone to intransigence and violent outbursts. Before the end of the year, the French cardinals had declared the election illegitimate and when Urban refused to step down, they elected their own Pope, even though the Pope in Rome was still reigning. Thus for nearly four decades Europe had two Popes, one pontificating in Rome and another in Avignon. The Great Papal Schism rooted itself into almost every geopolitical conflict in Europe: France aligned with Avignon obviously so England supported the Pope in Rome; Portugal aligned against Castile in her struggle to retain independence; Scotland aligned against England; the north Italian city-states aligned against imperial Germany; and ever-independent Flanders aligned against France. By 1409, all sides agreed that the conflict was undermining the esteem of the papacy. At an ecumenical council convened at Pisa, both existing Popes were declared illegitimate and a new Pope appointed, but the two Popes refused to resign, so now there were three. Finally in 1417, the schism was brought to an end as another ecumenical council, where all of Europe's cardinals recognised Pope Martin V (1417-1431 AD) who would reside in Rome. The Great Papal Schism did not directly cause the decline in morality and discipline that the Church would endure over the next century, but papal authority had clearly been damages. Popes would struggle in vain to arrest the eroding of Church authority, and ultimately succeed only with the Counter-Reformation, in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Meanwhile in France, Charles V's reign marked a high point for France during the Hundred Years' War, but crisis would engulf the realm during the long reign of his son, Charles VI (1380-1422). He ascended to the throne at just eleven years old, and in later life suffered bouts of insanity and delusions; famously believing he was made of glass or denying he had a wife and children. The first half of his reign was dominated by his uncle, Philip of Burgundy (d. 1404), who squandered the financial resources of the kingdom that had been painstakingly built up by Charles V, for his own personal profit. Royal forces were used to suppress an uprising in Flanders, where Philip's father-in-law happened to be count; a few years later inherited by Philip himself through his wife. When Philip died in 1404, a fierce struggle for power developed between the mad king's relatives, his younger brother Louis of Orléans (d. 1407) and cousin John of Burgundy (d. 1419), son of Philip. When John instigated the murder of Louis in a Paris street in 1407, the conflict degenerated into a bitter and protracted civil war between John's supporters and his opponents led by Bernard of Armagnac; the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War (1407-35). The crisis would paralyse France for three decades, and was further complicated by a third warlike power on the scene, England. Hundred Years' War (1415–53) In 1415, the new English king, Henry V Lancaster (1413-22) renewed his claim to the French throne hoping to exploit the French civil war; his claim was highly questionable since by the line of succession, he shouldn't even be king of England. Henry V crossed the Channel with a force of some 10,500 men, and seized the port of Harfleur in the Seine estuary after a five-week siege. In the face of the greater threat from the English, the Armagnac and Burgundian factions negotiated a hasty truce. A large French army seemed content to harass and block the English to starve them into submission as they marched north towards Calais intending to withdraw. With his army very low on food, Henry V forced them into battle some 25 miles south of Calais. The Battle of Agincourt (October 1415) is one of the most famous battles in English history. On Saint Crispin's Day, Henry V personally led his troops into battle, but the French lacked coherent leadership since Charles VI was mental incapacitated at the time. The English took up position in a narrow valley hemmed by dense woodland, with his forces arranged in the favoured English defensive formation, with bowmen on each wing and infantry in the centre, all provided with stakes to plant in the ground as an instant palisade. On the night before the battle, there had been very heavy rain which the initial French cavalry charges turned into some resembling a boggy ploughed field. The leadership and conditions favoured the English, and Agincourt proved the third great English victory. Henry V and his army reached Calais four days later, and sailed back to England in triumph. For the French, the battle was an overwhelming disaster; some 6000 Frenchmen were killed including perhaps 40% of the French nobility. After raising further funds for the war, Henry V returned to France in 1417, and began a systematic campaign to subjugate Normandy. The capital Rouen finally fell in January 1419 after a six month siege, turning the home of his Norman ancestors English for the first time in two centuries. Meanwhile, the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War reignited, with the Burgundian faction blaming the Armagnacs for the disaster of Agincourt. Furthermore, with the death of the elder sons of Charles VI, the future Charles VII'' ''became the heir to the French throne or Dauphin. He was a supporter of the Armagnac faction and less conciliatory than his brothers had been. A bitter struggle was fought around Paris for control of the capital, which eventually fell to the Burgundians in May 1418, forcing the Dauphin to flee to Bourges. From this position of strength, John of Burgundy met with the Dauphin to negotiate an advantageous peace, but at that meeting was murdered. Rather than break the Burgundian faction as young Charles had hoped, the murder ended any chance of settling the civil war for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, Charles VI's queen, Isabella, brought her incapacitated husband into the Burgundian camp, so now the mad king and his heir were on opposite sides of the struggle, in which both factions were committed to the each others destruction, even if it meant an alliance with the English enemy. In 1420, Henry V signed an alliance with the Burgundian faction, who controlled Paris and most of northern France. The Treaty of Troyes was extraordinarily advantageous to the English cause; Henry V married Catherine, daughter of King Charles VI of France. Within a year, they had a son. Within two years, Henry V and Charles VI were both dead. For the second time in the Hundred Years' War, a king of England had a valid claim to the French crown; the infant Henry VI Lancaster '(1422-1461 AD). It is hardly surprising that passionate French patriotism would resist the prospect of an English king on the French throne. However, it is unusual that the symbol of that resistance would be a seventeen-year-old illiterate peasant-girl, Joan of Arc '''(d. 1431). Joan had for some years been hearing voices, which she believed were the Archangel Michael and various other saints. Then in late 1428, she was given very specific instructions of how to turn the tide of the war; she must raise the ongoing English siege of Orléans, so that the Dauphin could go to English controlled Reims to be crowned in the cathedral where for centuries kings of France had received their coronations. Through sheers persistence, Joan was eventually granted an audience with the Dauphin in February 1429. Her reputation as a woman possessed must have preceded her, for the Dauphin conceals himself among his courtiers as a test. Joan immediately identified him, and told him of her mission. The political merits of the plan were obvious, to be crowned with the sacred oil at Reims would bolster his legitimacy with the common people; his rival, seven year old Henry VI, was safely back in England and had had no coronation at Reims. So Joan was provided her with some of his household knights, and allowed to join a convoy en-route for Orléans. Joan and her soldiers reached Orléans in late April 1429, which had been besieged by the English for six months, attempting to starve-out the garrison because they lacked the forces for a direct assault. Armed and dressed like a man, fighting at least as bravely as a man, her charisma breathed new confidence into the French force. One by one the English positions fell, and within ten days their army was in full retreat. The retreating English army was pursued and forced to stand and fight at the Battle of Patay (June 1429), a decisive French victory; again Joan credited with the victory although she was with the rearguard barely involved in the fighting. Joan of Arc was no military commander but her arrival and the subsequent victories gave credence to her message; that god was on the side of the French. With her arrival on the scene, the longstanding Anglo-French conflict had been effectively turned into a holy war. Joan was now ready to complete the second part of her mission, the coronation of Charles VII at Reims, 150 miles within English or Burgundian held territory. Yet her magic continued to work, as town after town freely opened their gates to the coronation party. In July at Reims, the Dauphin was crowned '''King Charles VII of France (1422-61), with for the first time the undivided allegiance of the French people. For the next ten months, Joan continued to campaign against the English and Burgundian forces, usually with considerable success. However in May 1430, she fell from her horse during a skirmish against the Burgundians at Compiègne, and was taken prisoner. She was handed over to the English who want her to expose her as a fraud and a heretic. She toyed with recanting in order to save her own life but in the end refused. On 30 May 1431, Joan of Arc was burnt alive at the stake. Few stories in history can match Joan of Arc's as an example of the immense power of inspiration; she was beatified in 1909 and canonised a saint in 1920. Yet even the death of Joan of Arc could not stem the new surge of French success. In 1435, the Duke of Burgundy acknowledged the trend and made peace with Charles VII, bringing an end to the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War and to the alliance with England. By 1437, the French had reclaimed Paris from the English, which once again became the capital, and leaving only Normandy and Aquitaine in English hands. The question for the English was no longer whether they could claim the French crown, but how much of their continental lands they could keep hold of. Yet the war descended into a long uneasy truce, with Charles VII realising the limitations of the resources available to him. He used the time very astutely: asserting firm control over his realm; centralising the government; and improving the kingdom's revenue with taxes now increasingly accepted as permanent by decree of the king's council. But above all, he reorganised the antiquated French approach to warfare into a more modern professional army, with cavalry drawn from the nobility and infantry from the rest of the population; France's first permanent professional army and arguably the first in Western Europe since Roman times. And he invested heavily in arguably the most significant development in the story of warfare; gunpowder weapons. The precise history of gunpowder remains obscure. While searching for the elixir of life, Taoist chemists in Han China seem to have discovered the appropriate mixture of saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur for gunpowder as early as the 3rd-century. By the 11th-century, the Song Dynasty were applying the black powder to warfare; fire-arrows and bombs lobbed at the enemy from catapults. But gunpowder's real destructive force only emerged in the development of artillery; it's use to propel a missile. Again it was probably first achieved by the Chinese in the 13th-century, but quickly adopted by the Mongols and used effectively in their vast conquest of Asia and Eastern Europe. The Muslims were reportedly using their own primitive cannons against the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut (1260). A few years later, the first cannons in Europe were seen during the wars between Christians and Muslims in Spain. It is fair to say that artillery was only truly perfected by Europeans with the breakthrough of casting gun barrels from molten iron; the Chinese had known about gunpowder centuries before Europe, but their artillery remained inferior right down to the 19th-century. Throughout the Hundred Years' War, the English and French had a wide variety of gunpowder weapons: large guns known as bombards firing stone-balls weighing up to 300lbs; small mortars, and portable hand cannons. However until the last phase of the war, they were laborious to load and fire, limiting their effectiveness. Charles VII and his artillery commander, Jean Bureau (d. 1463), are credited with making French artillery the most effective in the world. Throughout over a decade of relative peace, Charles VII nevertheless kept pushing the boundaries of what he could get away with, without provoking outright war; English ships were attacked, towns raided, and rebellions encouraged. In 1449, the English were finally provoked into a breach of the truce, just the excuse Charles had been waiting for. He invaded English Normandy, and the English position collapsed rapidly, with a great many of the locals switching sides to the French; the regional capital Rouen fell by October. With financial difficulties and a lack of leadership, the English were slow to respond but a modest force finally crossed the Channel to confront the French at the Battle of Formigny (April 1450). For much of the battle, the English bowmen achieved their now customary success, but with two small cannons the French won the day; perhaps the first time cannons played a decisive role on a European battlefield. The whole of Normandy was in French hands by August. The same pattern was repeated three years later in English Aquitaine. Aquitaine had been under the English since the 12th century, and there was much more resistance. The regional capital Bordeaux was captured in June 1451 but was lost again a year later. The French counter-attack culminated in the Battle of Castillon (July 1453). Again artillery played an important role. During the battle the French appeared to retreat, only the draw the English into position for the French cannon to open fire. It was nevertheless the sudden arrival of the Breton cavalry that ultimately turned the battle into an English rout. Castillon was the last major battle of the Hundred Years War, which itself was the last great medieval conflict. The centuries of the feudal knight were clearly on the wane, and century of the longbowman was already giving way to those of the gunner. The Hundred Years' War was formally brought to an end by the Treaty of Picquigny (1475), which left England with no possessions in France other than the port of Calais. The treaty was intended as merely a seven-year truce but no more was heard of this long dispute, other than an obsessive English affection for tiny Calais and the strange custom of the English kings including "King of France" among their titles until as late as 1801. For all the great sacrifice almost no territory had changed hands in the French victory other than the Duchy of Aquitaine. Yet the war had a profound effect on both nations. Historians have long considered the Hundred Years’ War a milestone in the emergence of a patriotic sense of national identity in both England and France. For the English, it led to the rejection of all things French including the French language, which had served as the language of the nobility ever since the Norman conquests. By retaining Calais for another two hundred years the manufacturing towns of Flanders were kept open to English wool and cloth merchants. They were finally cured of their taste for continental intervention, instead turning their focus to internal development. Nevertheless, the political and financial troubles which emerged from the defeat were a major cause of the War of the Roses. For the French, Charles' victory was not just over the English but over the troublesome French nobles. By the end of the war, only Burgundy, Flanders and Brittany enjoyed some nominal autonomy at least for now. Taxes were increasingly accepted as permanent, without the restraints that Magna Carta and parliament placed on English kings. France was well on the way to the absolutist monarchy that would characterise later centuries. The war was also a time of rapid military evolution. Heavy cavalry was still considered the most powerful unit in an army, but no longer the indomitable force it had been. Several tactics mitigated its effectiveness on a battlefield, not just longbowmen and artillery, but also nimbler lightly armoured mounted troops. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the war was the emergence of two powerful and antagonistic nations states. The dominant theme of Europe for the next five-hundred years would be the Balance of Power between the great powers. England and France were the first two to emerge, but others would join and sometime decline and leave. This perpetual economic and intellectual rivalry, ceaseless arms-race, and soon competitive acquisition of colonial territories would spur Western civilisation to the unchallenged dominance of the world that it would enjoy from the 19th century until World War I. Ottomans and Fall of Constantinople (1453) Another effect of the Mongol invasion of the Middle East, was that it took some pressure off the remnants of the Byzantine Empire which clung on in the city of Nicaea. Constantinople had been captured by the Crusaders in 1202. In 1261, less than a thousand Byzantine troops were scouting near their home city, where they found the entire Crusader garrison away on a raid. Entering via a secret passage, they flung the few remaining guards from the city walls, and sealed the gates again. The Byzantine Empire would endure in Constantinople another two centuries, but the heart had gone out of it. They would remain isolated, weak, and ultimately helpless before the rise of the Ottoman Turks. Although Constantinople had been reclaimed from the Crusaders in 1261, the heart had gone out of the Byzantine Empire. It was an isolated, weak, and impoverished shadow of her former self. The Black Death struck the city hard, and the population, once the largest in Europe, shrank to less than 100,000. No longer able to stand as a bulwark against the Islamic tide, the empire was failing just as a hostile new power was rising. When the Mongols conquered Baghdad in 1258, Seljuk Turkish power was broken, and the Muslim world fragmented into the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Mongol Il-Khanate of Persia, one of the four divisions of Genghis Khan's vast empire. Anatolia meanwhile desolved into a patchwork of petty-sultanates. Groups of Turkish nomads came flooding in, and one of them, led by an extraordinary warrior called Osman (1299-1323), won control over a region around Sögüt; the foundations of the mighy Ottoman Turkish Empire (1299–1922). Like most Turks, the Ottomans lived in a style in keeping with their roots as nomads of the steppes; riding out to war was their everyday activity. Sögüt provided an unusually favourable location: it bordered the enfeebled Byzantine Empire providing opportunities for raiding, plunder and expansion; and had access to the Black Sea for trade. At first lacking siege-craft, they expanded slowly by strangling their victims into submission by pillaging the surrounding countryside and flooding towns with refugees. The Ottoman Turks would nevertheless prove uncommonly fast learners. The Byzantine stronghold of Bursa fell them in 1326, Nicaea in 1331, and Nicomedia in 1337 just across the Hellespont was Constantinople. Ironically, it was the Byzantines themselves that allowed the Ottomans a toe-hold in Europe. During a squabble for the Byzantine throne, one claimant ceded the town of Gallipoli to them in 1354. Eight years later, the Ottomans conquered the major Byzantine city of Adrianople and moved their capital into Europe. A stranglehold was being applied to Constantinople, but the Turks first looked for easier plunder elsewhere. They expanded westwards into the Balkans, where their initial successes prompted the formation of the formidable Ottoman standing army known as the Janissaries. A human tax was imposed on these conquered Christian territories; a tribute of children, handed over as slaves to be trained in the art of war. This large highly trained professional army prove a great advantages while Europe was still transitioning from medieval feudal armies. Victory at the Battle of Kosovo (June 1389) bought Serbia under Ottoman control, and Bulgaria was fully occupied by 1393. Hungary now directly threatened by rising the Turkish tide called on the West for help, but at the Battle of Nicopolis (September 1396) the Crusader army was crushed; often considered the last significant Crusade. The Byzantines were now hemmed-in to the hinterland of Constantinople surrounded on all sides by the Ottomans, but in 1402 they were given a sudden reprieve. Timur (d. 1405), a great Mongol conqueror in the style of Genghis Khan, spent half his life rising from humble origins to establish control over a region around Herat in Afghanistan. He was almost fifty when he began, in 1383, an astonishing two decades of far-flung military conquest. By 1394 he had extended his empire throughout Persia and Mesopotamia. Two years later, he had conquered up through the Caucasus and briefly occupied Moscow. Another two years after that he captured Delhi in India. Timur ruled in the Mongol style, brutally. Uprisings were put-down by massacring populations of entire cities, with the skulls of the dead forming the masonry for towers that would stand as cautionary tales. By 1400, the conqueror, now in his mid-sixties, was marching west. In 1401, he defeated an army of the Mamluks of Egypt, and sacked Damascus and Baghdad. The next year, he shattered an Ottoman Turkish army at the Battle of Ankara (July 1402), capturing the Ottoman Sultan who was reportedly kept in an iron cage for the rest of his life. Timur died of an illness at the age of seventy in 1405 while attempting to conquer Ming China. It took the Ottoman Empire decades to recover after the defeat at Ankara, re-entrenching control over many regions which sought to reassert their independence. The recovery was effectively marked as complete by the virtual annihilation of a Hungarian and Polish army at the Battle of Varna (November 1444). The Byzantines however had been too weak to take advantage of the respite. The response to desperate appeals to the West for help was always to convert to Catholic Christianity first; the West was still asleep to the danger of the Ottomans. The situation turned desperate for Constantinople when Mehmed II (1451-81) ascended as Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He started his reign as he meant to go on, murdering the infant legitimate heir; he would later famously remarked “''whichever of my sons inherits the sultan’s throne, it behove him to kill his brother in the interest of the world order.” Mehmed made no effort to hide his intentions of conquering Constantinople, but at least in Emperor Constantine XI (1449-1453 AD) the once mighty Byzantine Empire would go down fighting in honourable Roman tradition. Charismatic and courageous, Constantine had over 20 years first-hand experience of fighting the Turks, and inspired fierce loyalty in others. In April 1453, Mehmed II applied to Constantinople the stranglehold that had been threated for nearly a century. He initiated a tight blockade of the city by both land and sea, with an army of 150,000 men and a fleet of 130 ships. Among his weapons were numerous cannons, including one more than two times larger than any yet built. The cannon weighed 19-tons, required 60 oxen and 200 men to manoeuvre into firing position, and could propel seven stone a day each weighing 600 lbs. It had been built for the Ottomans by a Hungarian specialist called Orban who had first offered his services to the Byzantines, but the emperor had been too impoverished to pay him. Despite having just 7,000 soldiers, Constantine XI refused to surrender, placing his faith in the formidable Theodosian Walls. From 6 Apri, the city-walls were subjected to a bombardment unprecedented in the history of siege-warfare. The Ottomans soon had a breach, but each assault was repulsed, with the defenders venturing out each night to turn the rubble into makeshift defences. Frustrated with his lack of progress, Mehmed turned to the more vulnerable sea wall withing the imperial harbour, itself protected from enemy ships by a great chain across the harbour mouth. But the young sultan had an answer to that. In a stunning display of Turkish planning and organisation, 70 ships were dragged on wheeled carriages over a 200-foot hill and into the harbour. One Sunday morning in May, Constantine XI awoke to find Turkish ships in the harbour, and many more miles of wall to defend. Remarkably, the Byzantines still managed to hold-out for almost a month. Then just after midnight on 29 May 1453 the final all-out offensive began. By dawn, every bell in the city rang the alarm and the civilians sought refuge in the Hagia Sophia to pray; the Turks were in the city. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, seemed to be everywhere at once, shoring up the line wherever it wavered. When all was lost, he plunged into where the fighting was thickest, and was lost to history. Mehmed then gave his troops free rein in the conquered city for three days. The carnage was terrible. Only Hagia Sophia was ordered to be spared; the great church, for many centuries the most magnificent in Christendom, now began her new life as an Islamic mosque. And so, Constantinople became the heart of a great empire once again; the new capital of the Ottoman Empire with a new name, Istanbul. Mehmed launched into a busy building programme, founding several mosques and beginning the Topkapi Palace, the main residence and administrative headquarters of the Ottoman Sultans for almost 500 year. The population of the city had been much reduced after decades of fear and uncertainty, so Mehmed repopulated it. Promising a multicultural and tolerant city in the long-standing Muslim tradition, he encouraged Byzantines to return and other Greeks to resettle; the whole of Greece became part of his empire in 1460. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch was restored within a year, and a Jewish quarter established. From these nuclei, the metropolis developed rapidly and 50 years later, Istanbul had become the largest city in Europe again. Meanwhile, Mehmed conquered Bosnia in 1464, where a notably large portion of the native population voluntarily convert to Islam, unlike in neighbouring Serbia which remains largely Greek Orthodox; a distinction with resonance in more recent history. The Venetians were driven out of their eastern Adriatic ports in Albania by 1501, completing the Ottoman conquest of the Balkan Peninsula. For a time, Europe was given some respite with Ottoman focus turning to the Middle East, but expansion would continue in all directions until the empire reached the peak of her economic, military and political power under Suleiman the Magnificent. The cultural contribution and legacy of the Byzantine Empire has often been overlooked by Western European historians. The disregard of the West for the East is the tragic legacy of the fault-line through Christendom, the Great Schism of 1054, with the final divorce coming in the tragic Fourth Crusade. The bitterness of that blow, forgotten so quickly by the West, endured in the Byzantine memory. The contempt was mutual; Byzantine became a synonym in the West for effeminate decadence and unnecessary complexity; when the Ottoman noose tightened and the only chance of survival was to submit to the Pope, the Byzantines responded "''Better the Sultan's turban than the Pope's mitre.", and no less an authority than Voltaire held that Byzantine culture was, "a worthless collection of orations and miracles." In 1453, Western Europe was just being reintroduced to its own roots through the Renaissance, in part spurred by Byzantine scholars fleeing their homeland bringing with them the forgotten classic knowledge. The West is the heir of Greece and Rome only because the Byzantines preserved it; 40,000 of the 55,000 surviving texts were sourced from Constantinople. Yet for 800 years, the stoutness of Constantinople's walls had insulated Western Europe from the conquering armies of Islam, and given it the time it needed to recover from its chaotic medieval period. Until the late 12th century, Constantinople was by far the largest city in Europe, exerting an almost mystical pull; kings in the West tried to copy it, Popes tried to rival it, and as far away as Scandinavia it was known simply as The City. When Western nations did emerge and set about forging formal political institutions, they were often influenced from the most sophisticated government and bureaucracy available to them; Byzantium. Byzantine architecture and art, particularly in religious buildings, was renowned in the Middle Ages. Both the Caroligians and the Ottonians made a conscious effort to produce art that would be fit to stand next to it. As one breathless Russian envoy said of the Hagia Sophia, "We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men." Long before the mid-15th-century, the legacy of the Byzantines had already been secured to the future. It lay in the rooting of Eastern Orthodox Christianity among the Slav, Greek, and Russia peoples, and enduring within the religiously tolerant Ottoman Empire; today it is the second largest Christian Church in the world with some 260 million members. In the field of law, Justinian the Great’s reforms to the legal code would come to serve as the basis of not only Byzantine law, but law in many European countries as well as Church canon law; it formed an important basis for Napoléon’s legal code of 1804 AD. Many would try to claim themselves as the successors of the Byzantine emperors. Russia especially with its Byzantine alphabet and Eastern soul saw itself as carrying the flame; the word Tsar derives from Caesar. But the true inheritors of the long Roman tradition were in fact the Muslim Ottoman Turks. Under the great-grandson of Mehmed II, Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottomans would essentially reconstruct the Byzantine Empire of Justinian the Great, ruling some 25 million people as a more just and well-administered domain than anything in Western Europe at the time. Early Renaissance (1350-1490) From the 14th century, European cultural life was profoundly affected by the efflorescence period of arts and ideas known as the Renaissance (1350-1620). It began in Italy and then gradually spreading to the rest of Europe, with its influence felt in painting, architecture, sculpture, philosophy, literature, music, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Some scholars consider the term, which is French for "rebirth", to be unnecessarily loaded, often reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the Renaissance and individual culture heroes as "Renaissance men". Medieval Europeans are not some sort of depressed class in need of historical rehabilitation. The Middle Ages were an era of primitive economic and cultural activity, ignorance, superstition, and barbarism, although certainly the 12th and 13th centuries were unmistakably civilised. The Renaissance was and is a useful myth, as long as we remember: stylistic hints of the coming Renaissance could be seen well before 1300; and classical learning was never entirely absent from European society, but earlier scholars focused quite narrowly. Certainly people at the time believed that they were living in an era that was special. As Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457) said, “''I do not know why the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture had been in so long and so deep a decline and almost died out together with literature itself; nor why they have come to be aroused, awoken, and come to life again in this age; nor why there is now such a rich harvest both of good artists and good writers.” There are obvious reasons why Italy became the cradle of the Renaissance. A key feature of medieval Italy was her enduring political fragmentation, leading to a vibrant cultural as well as commercial competitiveness between the various Italian city-states and realms. These cities were very prosperous, serving as they did as hubs of international trade between Europe and the Muslim world and beyond. Maritime ports like Venice, Genoa, and Pisa had highly profitable trade networks. Milan was a major commercial and industrial centre, as was Florence which also had strong banking interests. Rome's wealth came from taxation upon her vast ecclesiastical network throughout Christendom, and as a major pilgrimage destination. There is a compelling theory that the Black Death had helped concentrate this wealth in the hands of the few that survived the plague. Furthermore, almost uniquely in Europe feudalism had not taken root there, and instead status came to be determined not by birth but by wealth and intelligence. Finally, Italy had an openness to foreigners and their ideas. Armenians, Turks, Greeks, Germans, Muslims, and others could be seen mingling with the locals in the marketplaces; Jews and other groups persecuted elsewhere in Europe often found refuge there too. If the Renaissance had a beginning, it was in the conscious revival of the study of classical Greek and Roman literature from about 1350. The movement became known as '''Humanism', implying an admiration for the finest achievements of the human race. In stark contrast to earlier scholars who almost exclusively studied practical works of science, philosophy and mathematics, Humanists were more interested in recovering works of literature, poetry, history, and oratory. The leading figure was Francesco Petrarca (d. 1374) who was appointed Poet Laureate in Rome in 1341. Petrarch believed that true eloquence and ethical wisdom had been lost during the Middle Ages, and could only be found by looking to the writings of the ancients, especially Virgil and Cicero. He convert many scholars to the cause of classical studies, the most influential being Boccaccio (d. 1375). Boccaccio devoted himself to tracking down forgotten classical manuscripts in monastery libraries throughout Christendom, clambering among ruins to note the inscriptions, and even travelling to Constantinople; the fall of Constantinople in 1453 provided Humanism with a major boost, for many eastern scholars fled to Italy, bringing with them Greek manuscripts that had been lost in the West. From these beginnings, Humanist turned to emulated the classics in their own imaginative literature, such as Boccaccio's Decameron, an important influence for the more famous Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400). Many of the Protestant Reformation's foremost theologians were followers of the Humanist method, including Erasmus, Zwingli, Thomas More, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. The idea of Renaissance is especially linked to innovation in art. Where Humanists visited Rome and other ancient cities to copy manuscripts, three Florentine friends immersed themselves in the details of the ancient buildings and sculptures; Filippo Brunelleschi (d. 1446) an architect, Donatello (d. 1466) a sculptor, and Masaccio (d. 1428) a painter. They were recognized in their own time as being the founders of a new direction in art, subsequently known as Renaissance Art. Brunelleschi is the pioneer who first evolved a scientific theory of perspective, which he applied to startling effect in Florence Cathedral (1436), the largest dome built since antiquity. Donatello was commissioned to provide marble statues of St Mark and St George for a merchant guildhall of Orsanmichele between 1411 and 1417, carving the free-standing figures in a more purely classical style than anything attempted by his predecessors. His most famous work, a statue of David in bronze to stand in a courtyard of the Medici palace, displays his unique style combining the glorious confidence of Greek sculpture with a new mood of wit and playfulness. Meanwhile, Masaccio’s frescoes for the chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine (1428) had a new freedom in the expression of emotion and a sense of depth that were among the great turning points of the Renaissance. The masters of classic Greece and Rome were finally being challenged. The Renaissance art movement would quickly spread throughout Italy, but was for a long was most associated with Florence, due to the patronage of one family, the Medici. The Medici rose from humble beginnings to become the predominant family in Florence until the 18th century, after initially making their wealth from a monopoly in the mining of alum, a chemical used for dying. They are probably most remember for two individuals in particular; Cosimo de' Medici (d. 1464) and his grandson Lorenzo de' Medici (d. 1492). They both were not only had a good eye for recognising artistic genius, but were also exemplary statesmen. Cosimo consolidated power for himself and his family in Florence. Florence's government was not as democratic as it appeared on the surface, but it was far more inclusive than any other political system in Europe before the Late Modern Era. Like his grandfather, Lorenzo generously supported the arts, notable Botticelli (d. 1510), arguably the outstanding figure of the early Renaissance. Botticelli worked mainly in Florence but also in Pisa and Rome, and his characteristic style can be seen in two of his best loved paintings: In Primavera (1478) and The Birth of Venus (1482). Renaissance ideas would slowly spread beyond the Alps throughout western and northern Europe, but the Netherlands and Belgium were a particularly early adherent; the Northern Renaissance. The Dutch and Flemish cities had strong trade and finance links with the Italian city-states, and a somewhat similar mercantile culture dominated by wool markets and the weaving industry. With wealthy merchants patronising the arts, the Low Countries developed a particularly vibrant artistic culture. A vast painted altarpiece in Ghent Cathedral completed in 1432 was only the first of a succession of masterpieces signed by Jan van Eyck (d. 1441). van Eyck perfected the oil painting technique and painted a series of striking works with a greater emphasis on naturalism and realism. But he was not alone in these extraordinary decades which introduced several outstanding masters, such as like Robert Campin (b. 1375), Rogier van der Weyden (b. 1400), and Hugo van der Goes (b. 1430). Another early adherent of the Renaissance was Frenchman Jean Fouquet (d. 1481). He spent four years in Italy, before returning to Tours where he painted a number of masterpieces such as the Book of Hours, detailed miniature illustrations of scenes from the Bible and lives of the saints. The cultural movement of the visual arts would reach its apex in the High Renaissance (1490-1529). The term Renaissance Man has come to mean someone with exceptional skills in a wide range of fields, and this period revolved around three towering figures: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. It would take a long time before Europe could break through the barrier that restricted creativity to Latin. Dante (d. 1321) was one of the first to write literature on a serious subject in a vernacular language, with his allegorical work, "The Divine Comedy". Other authors would increasingly follow his example: Petrarch (d. 1374) and Giovanni Boccaccio (d. 1375) in Italy, and Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) and William Langland (d. 1386) in England. Nevertheless, even the greatest of these vernacular texts could not reach a wide public audience until the printing press made large numbers of copies easily available. Category:Historical Periods